In the half century after World War II, California's Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation's most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the ......
The Spatial Politics of Idolatry and Magic in Colonial Mexico
For the Spanish colonizers of Mexico in the sixteenth century, the concept of 'excess' - even the word itself - covered a multitude of sins, including idolatry and magic. In Sins of Excess, Anderson Hagler uses the language of excess as a lens for examining how the colonizers of New Spain conflated cultural diversity into a superficially - and ......
On April 16, 1947, the French vessel SS Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, exploded in the port of Texas City, just north of Galveston, Texas. Nearly 600 people died instantly and property damage reached catastrophic proportions. The Texas City disaster remains, to date, the worst industrial accident in U.S. history. Among those ......
The Dakota War (1862) was a searing event in Minnesota history as well as a signal event in the lives of Dakota people. Sarah F. Wakefield was caught up in this revolt. A young doctor's wife and the mother of two small children, Wakefield published her unusual account of the war and her captivity shortly after the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas ......
The 10th Mountain Division and the Rise of Mountain Warfare
Mountains, Carl von Clausewitz said, introduce a "retarding element" into warfare. To fight in mountains, armies must overcome this challenge via survival strategies and mobility. But the techniques and technologies for doing so are best found in civilian skiing and mountaineering communities, a situation almost unique to mountain warfare. Ski, ......
During the Vietnam era, conscientious objectors received both sympathy and admiration from many Americans. It was not so during World War II. The pacifists who chose to sit out that war-some 72,000 men-were publicly derided as "yellowbellies" or extreme cowards. After all, why would anyone refuse to fight against fascism in "the good war"?This ......
Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom
No matter how skilled, thoughtful, and well-prepared professors are- or how motivated and engaged their students might be- things sometimes go wrong. In this empowering, smart, and refreshingly frank book, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating these inevitable snafus - and keeping the course of ......
Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom
No matter how skilled, thoughtful, and well-prepared professors are- or how motivated and engaged their students might be- things sometimes go wrong. In this empowering, smart, and refreshingly frank book, Jessamyn Neuhaus offers college educators a roadmap for anticipating and navigating these inevitable snafus - and keeping the course of ......
The Mexican-American War of the 1840s, precipitated by border disputes and the U.S. annexation of Texas, ended with the military occupation of Mexico City by General Winfield Scott. In the subsequent treaty, the United States gained territory that would become California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. In ......
